Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 35: Through the Looking Glass [Pt 1]: My Initiation Into The Anomalous

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

This episode is going to be different, because for the first time I’m going to talk about something that I never thought I’d talk about publicly, which is my own anomalous experience and how it changed everything about my life and directly led to me starting this podcast.This is the story of my own highly subjective journey. I’m not asking you to believe anything that I’m saying. My own opinion about what happened to me has changed more times than I count, and I have no doubt that it will change again. My purpose in telling this story isn’t to convince you of anything, but rather to explore in as open and unflinching a way as possible, what it’s like to have an anomalous experience, and to use that as a way to discuss the many complex questions that these experiences raise.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowEPISODE BRIEFTHE INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCESI want to thank the Institute of Noetic Sciences for their collaboration, generosity, and patience with me as I’ve worked on this story. You’ll see in episodes 2 and 3 of this series how exactly they became involved in the strange tale I’m about to tell. In my opinion the work that they are doing is some of the most important work being done in the world and is helping to lay the scaffolding for a new and emergent understanding of the nature of our reality, what it means to be human, and our place in this vast and dazzling cosmos.I hope that if you aren’t already familiar with IONS that you’ll take some time to explore their mission and their work. And if anything in this series speaks to you and you have a little extra give, please consider making a donation to help support IONS into the future.To make a gift, visit noetic.org/give.BECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. This episode is going to be different because for the first time, I'm going to talk about something that I honestly never thought I'd talk about publicly, which is my own anomalous experience and how it changed everything about my life. and directly led to me starting this podcast. There are a few reasons why I never thought I'd share this story. The first is that I've never wanted to center myself in the podcast. I've had a sense

from the beginning, and in this episode you'll understand a bit more about why I felt that way, that this podcast isn't about me. It's about you. This podcast is a flare that I sent up with the hope of signaling the way to a different kind of thinking and being in the world. I can't draw you a map because my own path has been so utterly unlikely and filled with unpredictable twists and turns that I could never hope to translate it to someone else. And I've come to understand that I don't need to draw anyone a map. Everyone's path is their own, and that path can only be discovered by walking it. In that sense, my story really doesn't matter so much as the questions that set me on the path, and those questions are universal. They aren't anchored to this moment in time or to anyone's

particular experience. They're the bigger questions about the nature of our reality and the meaning of this seemingly absurd and unlikely existence. The mere act of seeking after those questions is enough to unfold your own personal myth and set you on a journey into the heart of the unknown. And while I believe all of that to be true, it's also been a rather convenient truth for me, because the other reason that I haven't shared this story is that I haven't wanted to. And while I've gotten to a place where the braver part of me wants to tell you about the craziest thing that ever happened to me, what is likely the wiser part of me thinks that I should never breathe a word of this to anyone. Because once I put this story out there, there

is no going back. I know how the world regards people who talk openly about having experiences that can't be explained within our normal framing of things. I know that in the eyes of many, it means wearing a mark of shame that can never be washed off. I know that it means that an asterisk will be put next to my name and to my work, that my integrity, my credibility, my intellect, and my sanity will always be in question. And for what? To tell you a story that I don't even have the words to properly convey? A story with a baffling beginning, no clear ending, and a million unanswerable questions in between? This episode is a month overdue, even after having six months to write it, because I've spent every single day of the last

few months asking myself if I really want to do this. And the truth is that I don't want to do this. But just as I imagine a first-time skydiver teetering in the open door of a plane fights every rational instinct in their body and takes the leap in pursuit of some higher truth or understanding about what it means to be alive, I'm going to do it. It's taken me a while to muster up the courage, and having found that I don't have quite enough of it to justify my next move, I'm doing it anyway, come what may. Because as you'll see in this three-part series, I've come to believe that this is a story that is demanding to be told. I'm not sure why exactly, but I'm too curious and too invested to turn back now. That said, this is the story of my own

highly subjective journey. I'm not asking you to believe anything that I'm saying. My own opinion about what happened to me has changed more times than I can count, and I have no doubt that it will change again. My purpose in telling this story isn't to convince you of anything, but rather to explore in as open and unflinching away as possible what it's like to have to have to have. have an anomalous experience, and to use that as a way to discuss the many complex questions that these experiences raise. Before I begin, I want to thank the Institute of Noetic Sciences for their collaboration, generosity, and patience with me as I've worked on this story.

You'll see in episodes two and three of this series how exactly they became involved in the strange tale that I'm about to tell. In my opinion, the work that they're doing is some of the most important work being done in the world, and is helping to lay this scaffolding for a new and emergent understanding of the nature of our reality, what it means to be human, and our place in this vast and dazzling cosmos. I hope that if you aren't already familiar with ions, that you'll take some time to explore their mission and their work. And if anything in this series speaks to you and you have a little extra to give, please consider making a donation to help support ions into the future.

I've late to their website in the episode description. All right, so here it is. Here is the story of the weirdest thing that ever happened to me. It was a quiet Saturday morning in August of 2021. I was sitting in the middle of my king-sized bed with books and notebooks strewn haphazardly across the duvet. I'd recently gotten obsessed with UFOs, like really, really obsessed. My plan was to spend the entire day the same way I'd spent every free moment for the past three months, learning everything I could about the phenomenon.

I'd had strange fixations before. I've always been what one might call prone to enthusiasms over the more curious and absurd aspects of human experience. But something about this was different. Nothing had ever taken over in the way that this had. What started out as a passing curiosity about the recent stories about UFOs that I'd seen in the news

had turned into an obsession once I realized how much evidence there was that something very strange and yet undeniably real was happening, even though I couldn't quite figure out what it was. Recognizing the reality of the UFO phenomenon was a record-scratching moment in my life. It brought everything else to a halt. My entire focus narrowed to just that point. What consumed me, beyond just the desire to understand what this thing was, was a furious need to understand how I had missed it in the first place. I'd seen a UFO once with my own eyes when I was 13. I knew even then that there was no human explanation for its sharp right-angle turns or its impossible speed. And yet, I'd continued on

with my life as though that weren't true. I'd constructed all of my beliefs around a walled-off inner courtyard, where this impossible thing still flew through the night sky. forever refusing to land. But in the spring of 2021, the swell of speculation around an impending report from the Department of Defense about what it knew about the newly and bureaucratically named unidentified aerial phenomena caused me to, once again, crack the door to that incongruent reality. Like Pandora's box, that opening unleashed something powerful that tore like a hurricane through every aspect of my life. What happened next is difficult to talk about. out. Actually, it's more than just difficult. In a very real sense, it's impossible. The language that we

share is an agreement between us. We encounter things and concepts and our consensus reality, and we agree upon the sounds and symbols that correspond to those things. We point to a teacup and say teacup. We point to a tree and say tree. And although it's an imperfect system with plenty of room for disagreements and misunderstandings, it works well enough that we mostly don't notice. But we don't have words for what happened to me that morning. I can't tell you what happened because I don't know what happened. I can't tell you what it was. I can only attempt to tell you what it was like.

But because it was so utterly unlike anything that I've experienced or even thought was possible, no matter how accurate I try to be in my descriptions, those descriptions can only ever be irretrievably flawed. The words are but shadows of something else that I can't name. What follows is my attempt to do the impossible, knowing that I will fail. I ask for your patience and grace as I try to describe it. I'll be as honest and transparent as I can be, but it's important for us both to recognize that what I can't be in this instance is truthful.

I can only feebly point toward the truth of something that I don't really understand. So here it goes. As I was sitting there on my bed surrounded by books, I suddenly had an immersive and utterly obliterating experience, unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. The closest thing that I can compare it to is salvia. So maybe I should start there. Salvia, commonly known as Salvia divinorum, is a psychoactive plant recognized as one of the most potent naturally occurring hallucinogens in the world. Salvia's effects can vary widely and can include visual distortions, intense hallucinations, a sense of traveling through time and space, and out-of-body

experiences. These effects are usually short-lived, typically lasting just a few minutes. Historically, Selvia Divinorum has been used in religious and healing rituals by the Mazatec shamans of Wahaka, Mexico. In these indigenous communities, the plant was used for its psychoactive properties during spiritual healing sessions, where it is believed to facilitate mystical visions and insights. And up until 2009, this extremely powerful lucidogen was totally legal in my state. You could literally buy it at the gas station. And so one fateful day in college, after buying it on a whim, my friends and I gathered around a table in our crowded shared apartment and decided to give it a try. None of us had heard of Salvia before, and none of us had any idea of what we were getting

ourselves into. Ah, the follies of youth. We loaded up a bowl, and we loaded up a bowl, and and one of my friends took the first hit. We expected him to pass it to the next person, but he suddenly stood up, his eyes wild and unseeing, and stumbled backwards, knocking over his chair, until he hit the wall behind him. He slid down to the ground, his hands stretched out in front of him as if he were shielding himself from a blinding light. His face was twisted in a mix of awe and sheer terror. Tears streamed down his face as he sobbed and cried out wordlessly. We all sat there, too alarmed and too transfixed by what was happening in front of us to even move. It only lasted a minute, maybe two, and then he seemed to slowly become aware of the

room around him. He shrank back against the wall and cried silently. I was the first one to speak. Jesus, dude, what was that? Did you see God or something? He just nodded as he held his head in his hands. We tried to comfort him, but he didn't want to be touched. He pulled out a cigarette and smoked it with shaking hands. After a few more minutes, he gathered himself and made some excuse about needing to leave. I remember asking him if he was good to drive. He just looked at me and said, yeah, I'm totally fine. It's like nothing ever happened, except he trailed off. I just nodded, and he left. Now, you would think that that would have been enough for all of us to be done with the whole thing, but as freaked out as I was by what I'd just seen, I knew I was going to try it. I grabbed the

bowl off the table and I took a hit. I would say that I was instantly somewhere else, but as soon as the smoke filled my lungs, I wasn't really anywhere. The thing that is me seemed to dissolve entirely. I had no awareness of a self or an identity that was separate from what I was experiencing. And what I was experiencing was being a collection of cells. I understood all of their inner structures and processes. The feeling of interacting together as a whole in a perfectly orchestrated symphony was pure ecstasy.

It was a feeling of perfect unity and perfect joy. There was a sense of timelessness that this moment was the only moment and it was eternal. When flashes of the room around me began to tear through the fabric of this unity, it was completely foreign to me at first. I couldn't make sense of the shapes I was seeing.

I couldn't tell a face from a change. chair. I didn't remember any of my friends or myself or anything. It felt like literal hell was invading my perfect heaven and I was being dragged down into it against my will. When I suddenly found myself back in my chair and back in myself, I was gasping for air. What did you see? My friends asked. I didn't know how to answer them. I don't know, I said finally. And then I excused myself to the bathroom where I sat on the floor and cried. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's

trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Anyway, where I'm going with all of this is that up until that morning in my room in August 2021, that was the closest thing I'd experienced to whatever it was that happened to me. It was similar and that it was utterly annihilating. I didn't forget who I was exactly, but I felt entirely detached from that identity. My ego fell away and I felt like I merged with all that is. I was in unity with the whole cosmos and the feeling was ecstatic. It was also similar because my experience was very short.

It probably only lasted a couple of minutes. But that's where the similarities end. Unlike my experience on Salvia of being a collection of organic cells, this experience felt like being everything that is and was and ever will be all at once. I saw that time wasn't real in the way I'd conceived of it. Every atom of the universe was made of purpose and meaning, and time was just a way to connect these units of meaning into stories. And the infinite potential connections unfolded into an infinite number of stories, each one unique and precious and essential, but also utterly illusory. Everything is always here. Nothing is ever lost. It was effortless to follow the threads of these stories through the unity of all. I could follow as many as I wanted

all at the same time, and I felt my consciousness racing down this connective tissue in all directions simultaneously. It felt like play. It felt like laughing. I saw everything. I saw the birth and death of the universe, which wasn't a birth or a death at all, but a kind of breathing, an inhale and an exhale. I saw the history of this planet

and understood that a planet is not what I thought it was. Nothing was what I thought it was. Everything was alive. Everything was sentient. Everything had a sacred purpose. I saw my entire life laid out in a series of tableaus. As I watched them unfold, I felt like some intelligence slid behind me, just over my shoulder, just out of view.

Whatever it was was ancient. And so was I. And we knew each other. We loved each other deeply. Remember? It asked me without words. And I replied also without words from the center of my being. Yes, I remember. I can't believe I ever forgot. And I did remember. I remembered why I was born and what I came here to do. And every moment of my life suddenly snapped into place like a puzzle, and I could see the whole landscape of the thing that I had been building without even knowing it. Every moment of my seemingly aimless and checkered life had brought me to exactly where I needed to be, to learn exactly what I needed to learn. I'd run from it and denied it and done my best to throw away the best parts of myself. Even in my darkest hours, I had been protected and nurtured and gently guided like a child.

There was never any danger. There was never any way to do it wrong. How silly I was to ever think any of this was random. How ridiculous to ever think that I could ever be alone or lost or unloved. I had always been loved. I came from love and I was love. Love was my birthright and my most natural state of being. The love was infinite and effortless. I saw a lot of other things, some of which I remember, most of which I don't. There are flashes of images, vague impressions of deep insights, many of them about things like DNA and gravity, the nature of light, and of God. But as quickly as it began, it was over. I found myself back in my room, on my bed, only a minute or two after it started, with tears streaming down my face and a sound coming out of me that I'd never heard before.

That was somewhere between a belly laugh and a scream. As I came back to myself, I felt my mind scrambling to hold on to all that I'd seen, but the images and ideas scattered away from me in all directions, like a broken string of pearls that slipped through my fingers. Within seconds, the whole thing felt like a half-remembered dream. Almost immediately, the feeling of euphoria dissipated as an all-greens. consuming wave of grief washed over me. It wasn't just the sudden disconnection from what felt like the source of all beauty and light in the universe. It was the realization that in just a couple of

minutes, I'd been completely transformed. I could sense immediately that everything about me had changed, and that the person I'd been mere moments before was gone. It's hard to explain how I knew that I'd changed. Some of the changes in me were easy to identify. For instance, all of my adult life, up until two minutes before, I had been a strict atheist. I saw no evidence for the existence of God, and I thought belief in a creator was an intellectual crutch, used by those who didn't have the fortitude to come to terms with the absurdity and meaninglessness of their own existence. But now, I didn't just believe in God. I felt that I had some wordless understanding of what God was. I realized with a deep sense of awe that I had a soul and that I could feel it moving inside me

and that it was eternal. Other changes were harder to identify and reveal themselves over time. My values and how I choose to move through the world completely changed. I suddenly had the sense that it wasn't enough to just do the right thing out of some utilitarian notion of a social contract, but that goodness was a tangible reality. It no longer just mattered to me what I did, but what I thought and what energies I allowed inside of my body and put out into the world. Even if I couldn't name all of the changes in that moment, I knew that they were deep and lasting and profound. I knew I wouldn't just shake this off.

I was forever changed, and I knew that my life would be forever changed as a result. The grief of that was leveling. It was like a death. My first thought was of my fiancé. We'd been friends for a decade before we ever started dating. Something that had appealed to both of us in entering into a relationship had been that we both knew exactly what we were getting into. We understood each other on a deep level. We came from the same place and we shared the same perspective on the world. Building a life together on that foundation felt effortless. It was the happiest and most peaceful relationship I'd ever been in by a mile.

But what would happen to us now that I was suddenly so different? Without that shared foundation, would the life that we were building together fall apart? And what about my family and friends? I knew I couldn't hide this. What would they think of me? How would I explain all of this? Would they think I'd lost my mind? Had I lost my mind?

Was this what it felt like to go insane? Was something wrong with me? Did I have a brain tumor? I was spiraling. Sobs racked my body. I found my fiancé in the kitchen and tried to form words to tell him what was going on, but I couldn't get them out. I didn't even know what to say, but I felt like I needed to confess,

like I needed to beg for forgiveness. Changing so profoundly and without any warning felt like a betrayal of some kind. I was afraid that a wall would go up between us that I'd never be able to climb over and that we'd be lost to each other. I don't remember much about how that conversation went, but I know that I eventually did calm down enough to tell my fiancé more or less what had happened, and he was incredibly sweet in understanding, though I could tell that he was more than a little concerned about me.

We talked for a little while, and then eventually I went back to my room. As I sat back down in the middle of my bed where all of this had started, I grabbed a pen in a notebook, and without really knowing what I intended to do, I found myself writing out the outline of what would become my new podcast, the UFO rabbit hole. So the natural question that arises after hearing all of this is what exactly did I think happen to me? And the most honest answer that I can give is that for the first year, I really didn't think about it much at all. Whatever happened to me on that morning in August had changed me in profound ways.

I started praying and meditating daily, though when I prayed I didn't know exactly. exactly who or what I was praying to. I was still working full-time as a marketing exec, but the career that had once been my primary focus, in which had previously constituted an outsized portion of my identity, suddenly felt hollow and pointless. I'd find myself shuffling things around in my inbox and wondering how any of this had ever felt important. When I wasn't working, every available moment was spent researching and writing. And yet, while I suddenly had this seemingly bottomless thirst for knowledge about everything related to the UFO phenomenon, I had very little curiosity about what had happened to me. It's not that I never thought about it.

I did sometimes, usually late at night, but I found myself unable to really engage with it on an intellectual level. Thinking about it only left me with a deep sense of uneasiness, because while I found that I liked the changes in myself, I was happier, more peaceful, more focused, and had a deep and grounding sense of purpose, the idea that something outside of myself had somehow reached into my brain and changed me without my consent wasn't an idea that I liked to dwell on, especially because I didn't know what that something was. I had some notion that what I'd encountered was some kind of an intelligence. I was left with vague impressions of something both ancient and familiar, but I had no idea what that might be. And I was always choking

back the fear that the whole thing had been in my head, and that I was slowly but surely losing my mind. In November of 2021, I launched the podcast. I found that the outline that I'd written in the aftermath of my experience had been eerily prescient. After months of what felt like groping in the dark, it became the roadmap for my research. Each step built on the last, and what had been a confounding mystery, suddenly began to unfurl into a landscape that was complex, but traversal. I felt like I was starting to learn my way around. And the more I trusted the process, the easier it became. When I got stuck, I would reach for the nearest book and let it fall open to a page. And more often than not, the answer I was looking for was right there staring back at me.

The feeling was exhilarating, but also isolating. I didn't know how to talk about what had happened to me and what was still happening to me. When I tried to put words to it, it sounded crazy, even to my own ears. It felt like I was clawing at the walls, trying to stay anchored in the world I'd always known, while being inexorably dragged into the unknown. I found that, even greater than my fear that I was losing my mind, was my fear that I would be perceived as crazy by those around me. To not be trusted, to not be believed, to have walls of incoherence erected between myself and the people that I loved. Just the idea of that was paralyzing. And yet, to not talk about it, to no longer be truly known by those who had known me the best, was somehow worse. It felt like there

was no way forward that didn't end with me being alone. And so I did my best to keep the reality of what was happening to me at bay. I robotically continued to fulfill my obligations at work despite a growing disconnection that told me that that part of my life was over. When I wasn't working, I threw myself into the podcast. The busier I was, the easier it was not to think about it. So, for the most part, I didn't think about it. And even as the pressure from the cognitive dissonance became a silent scream, I did my best to continue as though nothing was different. And I was the same person that I'd always been. By the summer of 2022, almost a year after my experience in my bedroom, I was more obsessed with

a UFO topic than ever. But the focus of my research began to shift after reading Diana Walsh-Baselka's book, American Cosmic. At this point, I was rarely thinking about what had happened to me. Despite the sharp change in my personality and life direction, I'd mostly convinced myself that whatever had happened to me wasn't really much of anything at all. But even if I wasn't ready or willing to look at it at the time, there was something about Diana's work that stirred a sense of recognition in me. That summer, I found myself in a class on UFOs that Diana offered through morbid anatomy. I didn't know it at the time, but that class would end up changing my life in more ways than one. One of the most immediate ways that it impacted my life was that it made

me take seriously the idea of redaction. In the UFO community, we usually talk about redaction in terms of classified government documents. Such documents, usually obtained through Freedom of Information Act or FOIA requests, are often covered with blacked out rectangles to cover up words, sentences, images, and even entire pages of classified information that is deemed too sensitive to share with the public. But Diana's background as a scholar of religion made it clear to her that there is a kind of redaction that happens with the events around UFO and contact phenomena that caused the truth of these events to be obscured even before they make it into the hands of intelligence agencies.

She often refers to the example of St. Teresa of Avala, to explain how this process of redaction can significantly change how an anomalous encounter can be recorded and passed down in ways that significantly alter the details of the event as it was actually experienced. In the case of Teresa of Avala, there is a story where an angel appeared to her and pierced her in the heart with an arrow of love that fits. filled her with the ecstatic love of God. Paintings and artwork across the centuries

depict this angel in the way that we normally think of them in Western popular culture, as an ethereal, beautiful, human-looking, winged being. But when Teresa of Avala described the event herself, she described it very differently. She wrote about the event in her diary, saying, quote, Beside me, on the left hand,

appeared an angel in bodily form. He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels who seemed to be all on fire. In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and it left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. the pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease,

nor is one's soul then content with anything but God, end quote. As we can see from her personal account, the beatific images that are usually used to depict this event are hardly representative of the event as it was actually reported by Teresa of Avala herself. the being with its flaming face and flaming golden spear is transformed into a serene-winged angel, and the pain and horror of what went along with the ecstasy she experienced are swept under the proverbial rug. It can be hard to tell exactly how and why these changes occur. Perhaps the original story was considered to be just too graphic and disturbing for a more general

audience. Perhaps one of the original artists took creative license and the real details got lost in a 400-year-long game of telephone. That's the sort of thing that religious scholars try to sort out through redaction criticism. But for our purposes, it's just important to understand that these changes to stories do occur and often. But there's another kind of redaction that occurs that I'd never really considered,

which is the redaction that occurs when a person who has had an anomalous experience tells their own story. In American Cosmic, Diana explains how this process works, in a section about the work of famed scientist and eophologist Jacques Follet. She writes, quote, In his field of research, Jacques found that people tended to report different things

depending on to whom they were speaking. This happened in the case of Betty and Barney Hill. They reported empirical evidence to the Air Force, the sighting of a star-like object. But when describing their experience to people they felt would not be inclined to scoff, like Donald Kehoe and leader of their therapist, who ironically did not believe in you, UFOs. They divulged the story of an encounter with non-human beings. Jacques noted that this pattern

was repeated so often that when scientists in the military discuss UFOs, they are not talking about the same part of the phenomenon that the public perceives. In other words, there are two datasets, one of which consists of empirical and material effects, the other of which comprises the psychic or subjective aspects of the phenomenon. What keeps these two cases, two datasets separate, one secret, the other told to authorities, is the fear of public ridicule, or worse, the loss of one's job or credibility. The absurd keeps the phenomenon hidden and on the margin of legitimate society. End quote. Diana's work helped me to come to a few important realizations that redefined not just how I understood the UFO phenomenon, but how I interpreted

experiences in my own life. For one, I started to drive. recognize just how far removed the popular portrayal of the UFO phenomenon is from the experiences people actually have. And though I knew that intellectually, I started to truly recognize how deeply that reality had skewed my interpretation of events in my own life. For example, I was startled to realize during Diana's class that I'd actually had a UFO encounter when I was 21, but I'd never really recognized as such, that I could have overlooked such a thing after spending more than a year reading everything I could get my hands on about UFOs seemed impossible to me. And yet there I was, faced with the dissonance of that reality. I've told the story

before, and I'll link to that in the episode brief if you're interested in hearing it. But to make a long story short, I was in a metro park near Akron, Ohio, in 2007, when a friend and I watched something very large and cigar-shaped, come out of what looked like an invisible tear in the sky, floating right above the tree line and then disappear in the same manner in which it appeared about a minute later. It was broad daylight in the afternoon on a sunny day, and whatever this was looked like nothing I'd ever seen before. It had a discrete shape, but appeared fuzzy and translucent, like a dark brown smudge across the sky. I hadn't forgotten that memory exactly. I I'd returned to it occasionally over the years, but I'd never once thought of it as a UFO,

because it didn't look like what I thought a UFO should look like. Because it was somewhat translucent and without any visible hard surfaces, it didn't look like a physical craft. I never considered that it might have passengers or that it could be in any way technological or intelligently designed. I didn't know what it was, and because I didn't have any concepts or models in my mind that I could attach the experience to, it just floated in a kind of limbo

in some back recess of my brain where we tend to shove things that don't have anywhere else to go. It was the same place that I'd shoved my first UFO encounter when I was 13 that I talked about in episode one of the podcast. Although in that case, I did think of what I saw as a UFO,

despite only seeing a light, not a physical craft, doing impossible maneuvers in the night sky. But in that instance, I thought of it as a UFO, a UFO, because like so many other people have reported, that encounter began with the overwhelming and completely foreign idea that if I looked up at that exact moment that I'd see a UFO. But of course, for decades, I never really told that part of the story, because I thought it

made me sound insane. It's hard enough to convince someone that you saw a UFO, much less that you somehow knew that you were about to see one right before you saw it. It raises too many questions. It makes the story too messy. It throws your credibility into question. I didn't like telling the story even to myself. And so I just stopped telling it. And after a few years, I almost never thought about it.

And if anyone had asked me, if I believed in UFOs, I would have told them no. And I would have meant it. All of this led me to begin to really question the extent to which my own preconceived notions and biases had caused me to ignore and dismiss the contents of my own lived experiences simply because they didn't comport with my current view of reality. I was shocked to recognize how often I'd been willing to shrug off things I'd seen with my own eyes because I knew that it couldn't be true.

My lack of curiosity and concern about those things was also shocking and more than a little disturbing once I began to recognize them. I wasn't just reluctant to report the reality of my anomalous experiences to other people. Apparently, wasn't even willing to admit them to myself. These realizations pushed me to finally go back to the strange experience that I'd had in my bedroom a year earlier and start to question what exactly it was that happened to me. This part didn't happen overnight. It happened over the next year in fits and start. It still wasn't something that I really liked to think about. The idea that something unexplainable happened to me that instantly changed me and sent me on an entirely different course in my life was deeply uncomfortable.

If I'm being honest, even now it makes me feel a little queasy. I don't like the implications. I don't like the way that it sounds. I don't like the idea that people might think that I think I'm somehow special because truly I don't. I don't know what happened to me, and I don't know why it happened, and I don't even know how I feel about the fact that it happened. To be honest, I'm still wrestling with all of that. But slowly but surely, I gathered up the willingness to look at it and to begin to ask questions. In doing that, I very intentionally sought to not come to a conclusion.

My strategy has simply been to try to get out of my own head, and despite any lingering self-consciousness, and self-loathing for finding myself in this position, to simply allow myself to be honest with myself about the details of my experience as I experienced them while trying to judge them as little as possible. And once I was able to do that for more than a few minutes at a time, I started to look for accounts that sounded more or less like what I experienced and to consider what other people thought about them.

One of the first places where I found this sort of account was in a book by uphologist John Keel called Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind, which is a collection of some of his essays, articles, and lectures. In a 1979 lecture entitled Contactee Wrestling, Keel shared his growing skepticism about the flying saucer phenomenon. It's not that he doubted that there were strange things in the sky or that people were being contacted by some sort of a non-human intelligence, but for Keel, the narrative of the extraterrestrial coming from another planet and a flying saucer had become increasingly hard to support. There were a few reasons for his skepticism.

He cited examples that he found in historical records from the 1300s, the told of bright lights flying over cities during the height of the Black Plague, seeming to indicate that this was a phenomenon that had been with us since long before the flying saucer craze of the mid-20th century. But the primary source of this skepticism came from the contactees themselves. In the UFO community at the time, much like we see today, most researchers focused their efforts on reports of physical craft, while experiencers were generally ignored and ridiculed.

Keel took the opposite approach. His reasoning was that because the craft departed quickly and rarely left any tangible evidence behind, the best evidence would come from the firsthand witnesses of these encounters. Kiel ended up interviewing over 600 of these witnesses, focusing primarily on people whose stories had not yet been publicly reported, and what he found flew in the face of the popular UFO narrative of the day. He discovered that there were patterns in the contact-de phenomenon, many of which had been

seemingly overlooked by researchers who were only interested in recording evidence that supported the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And by examining these patterns, he identified six categories of contactees. And interestingly, While lights in the sky in contact with some kind of a non-human intelligence were a through line in most of these cases, the ways in which these encounters typically manifested bore very little similarity to the popular consumption of UFO contactees. These experiences were usually much stranger, much less linear, and far more absurd than the stories that were told in the mainstream of euphology. In fact, in many cases, these contactees didn't see a UFO in. at all. Or the UFO sighting happened in the days before the more profound experience that

changed their lives. And many of these cases were a striking resemblance to mystical encounters with the divine described in religious texts. At some point, in some future episode, I'd love to dive into all six of these categories and their various subcategories, but for the purposes of this conversation, we're just going to talk about one. Type 5. The Cosmic Illumination contactee. I'm going to read this section directly from the book. Kiel writes, quote, Now the fifth type, this is a type that we've known about for thousands of years. It's an integral part of every religion. We don't have any idea how it happens or why it happens. It's called cosmic illumination. This happens to many people who think that they're having a UFO experience.

They're actually undergoing cosmic illumination. There are libraries of books. that will describe it to you in detail. Basically, the person is usually alone, and a beam of light will come down out of the sky and touch this person. For a few minutes, this person will be in a different state of consciousness. He will suddenly be aware of everything,

of everything that's ever happened in human history, of everything that's ever going to happen. He will be totally aware of his linkage to the entire human race. It's the kind of experience the people who take drugs want to have, but seldom do. And it's a total experience.

It happens very briefly, sometimes in only 10 seconds. When the light ceases, the person sits down and tries to remember what just happened, but he can't remember any of it. It's all in his unconscious mind. This happens to millions of people in every generation. It's studied by every great church. As I say, there are libraries of books about this. A person's IQ usually sky rockets immediately after this happened.

Their personality changes. their consciousness changes. Very often they change their whole life. They will quit their job. They'll divorce their wife or husband. They'll start a whole new life. In many cases, they'll even change their name. As I say, this is not a rare experience. It's a common experience, except when it happens to somebody, they usually don't talk about it very much. They don't end up on 60 minutes talking about it. But people today often associate cosmic illumination with UFOs. They may have seen a UFO or a mysterious light earlier that night. Then suddenly they find themselves bathed in this usually reddish light,

and they think that the UFOs are doing it to them. But we don't know who is doing it to them. We just know that there is a force on this earth that is constantly manipulating the human race, reprogramming us, changing us for good or bad, directing us, toward a destiny that we can't define. It knows what it's doing, but we do not. End quote. I remember how stunned I was when I first read those words. This was the first time that I'd ever found anything that described something that sounded like what happened to me, much less in terms of a contact experience. At that point, I wasn't even convinced that what I'd encounter qualified

as a contact experience. I had this deep sense that it was somehow true. triggered by my sudden obsession with the UFO phenomenon, but I hadn't really thought of it in terms of actual contact, mostly because it bore little resemblance to the contact narratives I was familiar with. After reading this passage, I remember feeling a strange mix of both relief and terror. I felt relief because I suddenly realized that maybe I wasn't alone. My secret fear in all of this, and one of the main reasons why I refuse to engage with the fact that something of significance it happened to me, was because I was afraid that it meant that I was losing my mind. But the fact that something so similar had potentially happened to millions of other people

gave me hope that there was some way to make sense of it. Granted, the description wasn't exactly what I experienced. I hadn't seen a UFO immediately prior to my experience, but I had been thinking about them almost constantly for months. I don't remember being bathed in a reddish light, but my experience was full of insights about the nature of light, and the experience had been so all-consuming that I wasn't sure I would have noticed a light even if there was one. As far as I could tell, my IQ didn't skyrocket afterward,

but I was certainly experiencing levels of focus and productivity that were far beyond anything I'd been able to achieve in the past. I hadn't left my fiancé, and now husband, but I mostly credited that to his greater than average ability to be tolerant and open-minded. I could certainly see how this kind of thing could be the end for some couples. So basically, it wasn't exact, but it was close enough to make me think that there might be a shared structure to these experiences. And if there was a discernible structure, it gave me hope that there might be a discernible cause. But along with that relief, the terror was just as palpable.

The last two sentences of that passage spoke to a fear that I'd kept to. under lock and key since the day it happened. A fear rooted in the sense that I had been used and changed in some profound way toward an end that I didn't understand. It was a fear of that, although I was undeniably a happier person as a result of my experience, that I was somehow no longer my own, that I'd been taken over somehow without my consent. As Keel said, we just know that there's a force on this earth that is constantly manipulating the human race, reprogramming us, changing us for good or bad, directing us toward a destiny that we can't

define. It knows what it's doing, but we do not. As I continued my search for answers, another account that stirred a deep sense of recognition in me was that of Dr. Edgar Mitchell. Edgar Mitchell, an American astronaut and the sixth person to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, had a profound and life-changing experience while looking back at the Earth from space, which is now known as the Overview Effect. Coined by space philosopher and writer Frank White, the overview effect describes the cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight,

often while viewing the Earth from outer space. It is characterized by a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of, of the environment. Mitchell's encounter with the overview effect occurred while he was observing the Earth from the spacecraft window. He was struck by the planet's beauty and fragility within the vastness of space, leading

to an epiphany about the unity and interconnectedness of all living beings. He described seeing the Earth, Moon, and Sun against the infinite backdrop of the universe and feeling an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness, an experience that deeply altered his understanding of life and reality. Mitchell's experience of the overview effect had a profound impact on him, both personally and professionally. It prompted him to delve into the nature of consciousness, leading him to explore various fields, including quantum physics, philosophy, and spirituality to understand the underlying

principles of existence. He became convinced that a science-based approach to exploring the nature of consciousness and reality was necessary to bridge the gap between empirical science and inner experience. This conviction led him to establish the Institute of Noetic Sciences, or Ions. The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded with the goal of supporting and conducting research into the potentialities and power of consciousness, including perceptions, beliefs, attention, intention, and intuition. Mitchell's vision for ions was to explore the fundamental nature of consciousness,

investigate how it interacts with the physical world and how these insights could lead to a more harmonious and sustainable world. Ions focuses on areas that traditional science often overlooks or deems unquantifiable, such as the impact of consciousness on physical reality, the potential for psychic phenomena, and the exploration of altered states of consciousness. Mitchell's establishment of ions represented a pioneering effort to integrate scientific rigor with the exploration of subjective experiences and spiritual inquiries. He believed that by understanding the deeper aspects of consciousness, humanity could address the ecological, social, and spiritual challenges facing the planet. Through its research and outreach, Ions aims to foster a greater

understanding of human potential, promote personal and social transformation, and contribute to a shift in global consciousness towards greater wisdom and compassion. If you want to learn more about the work that Ions does, I encourage you to go back to the episode I've recorded with Ion's chief scientist Dr. Dean Radin back in December. It was a fascinating conversation and one of my favorite interviews that I've done. I'll make sure that's linked up in the episode brief. Despite the fact that I've obviously never been to space, there was so much in Dr. Edgar Mitchell's experience that resonated with me. From his experience of the deeply interconnected nature of reality to his profound shift in consciousness that catalyzed an abrupt shift in his interests

and a new sense of purpose in his professional life. And it also led me to deeper questions about the origins of these types of experiences. If my fascination with UFOs and Edgar Mitchell's experience of looking at the Earth from space could trigger within both of us a similar kind of awakening, then what exactly was going on here? How could these two things possibly be related and what was the ultimate cause of these rapid shifts in our perception, priorities, and values? And it wasn't just my case and Dr. Mitchell's case that I needed to reconcile. The more I read, the more I realized that there were seemingly countless triggers for these kinds of experiences, which, it turns out, were far more common than I'd ever realized, from deep meditation to near-death

experiences. And in some cases, they happened spontaneously, with no clear-in-sighting event at all. To understand what had happened to me, I knew that I needed to get down to the root cause. What was the source of my experience and the countless other types of similar experiences that have been reported throughout history? Was there truly some outside force that was doing this to people? The question of whether my experience had some kind of a cause outside of myself became a major focus at my inquiry. One of the most obvious interpretations of my experience is a spiritual one. As Keel noted in his passage about cosmic illumination, the sort of thing that happened to me is described in various forms by most of the religions of the world. And the fact that I emerged

from that experience with a deep conviction and both the existence and goodness of a creator god, after having spent most of my life as an atheist, could certainly be interpreted as some kind of a divine intervention. And I'll admit that, for me, it was a spiritual experience and one that shifted my consciousness profoundly towards spiritual concerns that had only been vague and largely unimportant abstractions to me before. And yet, the source and structure of my newfound spirituality remained a mystery. I want to be clear that I don't think that it was God that I encountered in my bedroom that morning. I don't know how one would know if they were being addressed directly by God, but I feel like that's something you would know if it happened to you. The impression of God that I walked away with

from my experience was something so vast and all-encompassing that the idea of receiving a direct communication from the fullness of that unfathomable source feels unlikely, if only because I'd imagine the experience itself to be utterly obliterating. I don't get the sense that something like that could happen and that I'd just be able to go back to being myself in any meaningful way, even in a highly altered form. But all of that is just a feeling. It's just a hunch. I find talking about God to be largely unproductive. Words fail. So if I don't think that it was God, could it have been some other kind of a spiritual entity? To be honest, that's an idea that I also sort of chaf at. But I will also grudgingly admit that it may have some explanatory potential.

potential. There's an idea that seems to be enjoying increasing interest and support in the UFO community, though it's hardly new, that the angels and demons described in the Bible and other religious texts are in some real way the same entities that are behind the UFO phenomenon. More positive experiences, like the one that I had, tend to be attributed to angels, while more negative experiences, such as the abduction phenomenon, tend to be attributed to demons. And while I initially thought that that idea sounded reductive and juvenile, when you dive into the history of these kinds of accounts, there does seem to be a real connection between what those in the past interpreted as encounters with angels and demons and more modern accounts of

contact. For example, what we now commonly referred to as alien abductions share many of the same features of what were considered to be encounters with demonic beings in the past. These things include unwanted intrusion, often in a bedroom, paralysis and the feeling of being physically controlled, telepathic communication, time anomalies, feelings of extreme terror, and physical after effects, including distinctive marks on the body. And, as in the case of Teresa of Avala, more positive experiences with non-human entities sure many of the same elements as stories of encounters with angelic beings. Some of these elements include feelings of ecstasy, a bright light or an illuminated being,

telepathic communication, and the transfer of spiritual revelation or esoteric knowledge. And while it's hard to deny the clear similarities between these different kinds of accounts, it's hard for me to fully accept that my experience was as the result of an encounter with some kind of a spiritual being like an angel. And I'd argue that there are some good reasons for me to resist coming to that conclusion. The first is that noticing the similarities between these kinds of experiences doesn't necessarily give us any more insight into their ultimate origin. Yes, it's entirely possible the phenomenon that people have called angels and demons

and the phenomenon that we refer to as contact with ETs or NHIs in the modern UFO movement might be referring to the same thing. We can't know that for sure, but if you're willing to allow that these sorts of things happen to people, it's not an unreasonable hypothesis. But I think it's important to also recognize how much both of these concepts come prepackaged with complex cultural, mythological, and archetypal baggage

that make it hard to know how much about these encounters is objectively true versus how much is the result of ideas that we've layered upon them. In other words, it's very easy for someone to assume that what we perceive as extraterrestrials or some kind of other alien being

are actually angels and demons, or conversely, to assume that what people called angels and demons in the past were actually aliens. But in all likelihood, both of those presumptions are false. And what we're dealing with here is something that collapses and exceeds any artificial categories that we try to use to contain them. For example, whether we're talking about angels and demons or benevolent and malevolent aliens of some kind, we're ultimately framing these experiences as encounters with beings that are intrinsically either good or evil, depending on how the person having the experience feels about it during and afterward. But there are plenty of reasons for us to suspect that it's not as cut and dry as that.

Imagine you're on a boat doing some deep sea fishing. You hook a fish and pull it up on the boat. You hold it in your hand as its gills gasp for oxygen, but out of the water it is slowly suffocating. You quickly see that the fish is too small and end up tossing it back into the water. Or imagine that you're a conservationist trying to protect a herd of endangered elephants. One day you notice that one of the few fertile females left in the group is ill and could possibly die. In order to keep that from happening, your team organizes a group to apprehend her in the wild, tranquilize her, and then administer the treatment she needs to get better before releasing her. In both of these scenarios, are your actions good or evil?

A lot of that depends on your personal beliefs. Unless you are a strict vegan, you probably allow that exercising at least some level of control over animals is justified in order to sustain yourself, even if many of us don't really like to think about what that entails. If you're a seasoned fisherman or hunter, you may not be bothered by these scenarios at all. You can ask 10 different people about what they think about the ethics of these two scenarios and get 10 different answers. But there are a few people who would qualify them both as either strictly good or strictly evil. And most people would at least admit that even if these actions could be classified as strictly good or strictly evil, that they don't define the ultimate nature of the people doing them.

People and life in general are far more complex than that. But for the fish or for the elephant, these are almost certainly extremely traumatic events. Much like in the scenario of a demonic encounter or an abduction, they were taken from their home by unfamiliar beings, pulled into unfamiliar environments for purposes that they don't understand. They experience physical pain and trauma. They likely experience extreme fear and perhaps even missing time. From their perspective, it suddenly becomes very easy to classify these experiences as evil. And in a certain sense, they aren't wrong, but they also aren't getting the full picture of the nature and intentions of the beings that are subjecting them to these horrors.

So, for me at least, the idea that what I encountered was something like an angel doesn't really get me anywhere in terms of answering my questions about the ultimate reality of what it was that I encountered. In many ways, I can and should assume that my perception of the positive nature of my experience is limited by my own models and understanding of the world. If what I experienced was a non-human intelligence of some kind, the reality of what it is and what it wants is far more complex than can be contained within my personal feelings about my fleeting encounter with it. But while I'm hesitant to assume anything about the nature of the non-human intelligence that I encountered, I will admit that I do tend to think about it as exactly that,

a non-human intelligence. And my reasons for that can best be articulated through the allegory of Plato's Cave. Regular listeners of the show will know that I got kind of obsessed with Plato's Cave last year, and this is a big part of the reason why. But for those who are new around here, here's a quick rundown of what it involves. The allegory of Plato's Cave presents a scenario where there are prisoners who have spent their whole lives tied up in a cave facing a stone wall. They spend all of their time watching shadows that are cast on the wall, and because it's all they've ever seen, they mistake it for reality. In this scenario, one of the prisoners is suddenly freed and dragged out of the cave. In this process, the prisoner sees that the source of these shadows is a great fire

that was burning behind them, with figures moving back and forth in front of it, carrying objects that are casting the shadows. As he has dragged further toward the mouth of the cave and finally outside, the prisoner's eyes are blinded by the light of the sun. Everything outside of the cave is incomprehensible to him. And after having looked at shadows all of his life, he can't make sense of the world outside the cave, even as his eyes adjust to the light. Upon reentering the cave, he has the reverse problem. Having been in the light of day, the cave is suddenly very dark, making it hard to find his way back to his fellow prisoners inside. And when he does and tries to tell them about what he is seen about the true nature of their situation. They don't believe him,

and they even threatened to kill him. It was actually as a result of Plato's cave that I ended up in Diana Fusulka's class, where I learned about redaction and began my quest to find out what it was that happened to me. In May of 2022, I had just finished reading American Cosmic and happened to see that Diana was being interviewed on theories of everything with Kurt Jymungal. I was trying to wrap my mind around what it was that I had just read. And so I turned on the interview very interested to hear what Diana had to say. In the course of that interview, she talked about Plato's Cave. And although I didn't have context yet for everything that she was saying, something about it resonated with me deeply. And I had the sense that this was the idea that I needed to unlock so many of the mysteries I was

confronting in my research. It just felt important in a way that was urgent. And so that's a night, for the first time since college, I sat down and read the allegory of the cave. In that story, I recognized so much of my own experience, from the disorientation of having my worldview dismantled, to the obliteration of encountering a reality that was beyond anything I'd ever imagined possible, to the fraught and frightening experience of trying to express to people what I'd seen, knowing that they wouldn't really believe me. But the thing that resonated more than anything else was the fact that the prisoner was dragged out of the cave. Whatever it happened to me, it didn't feel like something that I had chosen, or even that I had any real ability to resist.

I, too, had the sense that I was dragged out of my own cave. However, much to my frustration, the fact that the prisoner is dragged is only mentioned once, and no clue is given as to the identity or motivation of whoever is doing the dragging. But still, I was fixated on the story and felt that the answer I was looking for was somewhere contained within it. If only I could just find a way to understand it better.

When I saw that Diana was giving a class on UFOs that included material on the cave, I signed up immediately. Little did I know, the same day that I was listening to Diana on theories of everything, in a small town in Kansas, a philosophy professor named James Madden,

was also listening and was similarly electrified by Diana's discussion of Plato's Cave. Unlike me, however, James Madden deeply understood the ideas that Diana was pointing to, and he shared her somewhat subversive read on what exactly the allegory meant, including the fact that it wasn't strictly speaking an allegory, but represented something both profound and literal about the structure of human experience. Jim reached out to Diana and struck up a friendship that resulted in her inviting him to be a guest speaker

in the class I was taking, which is how I met James Madden, who has since become a dear friend and frequent collaborator. One of our very first conversations about the cave was recorded for the podcast, which I'm eternally grateful for, because it became such an important inflection point in my understanding, not just of the phenomenon, but in beginning to reckon with my own anomalous experience. And even more importantly, to begin to come to terms in an intellectual way with the thing that I'd found very hard to accept, but that had been apparent to me in a deeply visceral way since that morning in my bedroom, which was that I could come into contact with some kind of a non-human intelligence. I'll never be able to explain this as well as Jim does. So to illustrate what I'm

getting at here, I'm going to play a clip from that conversation. In this clip, Jim is explaining the greater meaning of the cave within the context of the book in which it's found, Plato's Republic. And if you hold on for the ride, you'll see where all of this is going. The book is, shall I say, book ended in death. So, like, I think you have to see that the Republic is about the problem of death. So it starts out. The guys are in a city outside of the cities, and they're going to stay for a festival, like Socrates and his students, and they're going to stay at this guy's house named Kefis or Seifis, who's an older guy. And they're asking him, you know, doesn't it suck to be old? He's like, oh, it's not so bad. I'm not burdened.

by carnal desire and all that anymore. And they're like, aren't you afraid of your death? And he says, well, I'm not afraid of my death because I've lived in just life. And they ask him, what do you mean by that? He's like, I've got to go to bed. I'm all. Okay, so you won't tell them. So then that occasion is the question of what is justice, which becomes the surface

level question of the entire book. But note, that is subsidiary to the question of death. Okay, like, why are we not worried about our death? Well, we're only asking after justice because we're worried about death. So then the question is, okay, what does it mean to be just? and it's asked about, initially about in the individual human being. And the claim is, though, well, it's just too hard to understand that individual, so we're going to talk about it at a political level.

So throughout the book, there's a parallel going on. We're talking about death by talking about justice. Okay, then even within that, we're talking about justice in the individual human by talking about it in the political unit. Now, I think an important episode that happens in leading up to the cave and allegory is at a certain point, Socrates is given his account of what justice is in the city. And Socrates then says, okay, how do cities get formed? And we then get a natural account of how cities are formed.

And it's based on just simple self-interest. Like, I've got wheat, Kelly's got cattle. I'm not good at cattle. Kelly's not good at wheat. So we have to depend on each other in exchange. And Socrates then says, though, sooner or later, though, like, Kelly's going to want more than what she can get naturally. so there's going to be cheating. And Jim's going to want more.

There's going to be cheating. And he argues that this means every natural founding of a city will end badly. Because it seems like we have to be better than we are to get ourselves off the ground on the right track in the first place. Okay. Now, keep in mind, he's saying that about cities and he's saying that about individual humans, that anything left to its own natural devices is going to end up falling into the cycle of violence and greed and thereby collapse upon itself. So natural foundings can't happen.

I want you to bookmark that because it needs to be important for my take on the Republic and why it's relevant to the phenomenon. We have this view of ourselves that we run this planet in as much as we do, or maybe we'll find out we don't, but we have the illusion that we run this planet because we think of ourselves as individually innovative, right? That, like, what really drives human success is that one of us thinks up a great idea, right? and we do things on our own and we're creative, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think if you look at a lot of the cognitive science literature on this, what really, really makes humans so successful. Part of it is we're actually really, really good conformers. Like, we don't talk about it's hard to hurt humans. We talk about it's hard to hurt cats because it's actually pretty easy to hurt humans. It's true. It's true. Okay, so this is a fairly famous experiment, and I hope I'm getting the details right,

whereas if you take a human child and a chimpanzee that would be, So that they're kind of relatively on cognitive par. And you can show them a box that's opaque and it's got a number of holes in the top. And you put a treat in the box and you go through a sequence of poking a stick in the hole that results in you hitting the lock that unlocks the box and you get the treat. Okay. So if you do it several times in front of the human child, the human child will, if you had to guess, will follow suit, right? Right. Do it in front of the chimp.

Chimp will follow suit. Okay, so far so good. Now, make the box transparent. So it's obvious where the lock is. Do the same sequence. Human kid will follow suit. The chimp will, bang, go right to the lot. Now, why is that? Because being human is really, really damn complicated compared to being almost any other animal. Right? We come out of the womb and we're not ready to do anything that we need to do. Whereas most animals come out of the womb, they're pretty well ready to go fairly quickly. But we have this long extended education. period that is child, right? And so, because cultural knowledge is part of our survival strategies, therefore we have to be very good at being taught. So humans come out of the womb with a default assumption that another human face is telling me the truth and they're probably have something good to tell me and I'm going to follow suit in the sequence. So what does that mean, though? It means, okay, we have to have a common that we walk around it. Like Heidegger calls this an everydayness, an ordinary everyday way of being in the world that's going to involve

basically conforming to other people, right? Like, I need you to stop at that stop sign. I don't want you to have your own existential, meaningful moment at the stop side. I want you to, like, do what you're told and stop at the stop sign. And so the idea here, though, is we need to have a conforming, basic, accepted system where we don't really question all that much. And it's going to even conclude, like, stories about what reality is. And so what I'm getting at here is, like, being in the cave,

looking at illusions that are put on the cave wall by other people. Isn't necessarily this dark evil conspiracy theory. It is just the human embodied condition. Because we're so good at creating caves for ourselves that we can share, it makes us very effective. And this is kind of where we start out in life, is we start out in a cave. And that's neither good nor bad. There's an interesting problem, like a meta problem about all this that I want to bring in

that's going to help us connect even deeper with the phenomenon. So what Plato is saying here is he saying, look, any natural human attempt to found a city, scare quotes, found a self, is going to end in self-collapse. It's going to end badly. So what you need to found a city is you need an educational system that produces philosopher kings who can run the city. But then there's this really difficult problem with how do you get a city in the first place then that's going to last? It seems like you need a good city to produce the philosopher. but you can't get a philosopher into, but you can't get a good city to you have philosophers that can be educators. So there's a circular problem of founding in the republic. And throughout the book, you get these very weird oblique references. Well,

next our educators will have to do this, or next our founders will have to do this, or next we will have to do this. But we're never told, like, who is that? Who is getting this off the ground? If indeed we're going to have a good city, it seems like we'd have to already have it in order to get it. And this is a common platonic theme where Plato says, hey, to know something, you'd have to have already known it.

There's only memory. There's not discovery. There's only memory. There's not discovery. So then how does the first person to leave the everyday common shared illusion and look out of the cave? How does that person do it? Because it seems like they would have to be educated by somebody who has it. Right. So it looks like something from outside has to reach in and pull us up. So something from outside our everyday cave illusions has to like peek its way in and guide us out of it. It cannot be just our own doing. Okay.

So I know that was a lot to throw at you all at once. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's definitely worth your time. And fun fact, it's actually the all-time most downloaded episode of the podcast so far, so I'm not the only one who thinks so. Anyway, the point I'm getting at, at here is that from the day that it happened, the sense that I had about what happened to me,

whatever that was, involved some kind of higher intelligence reaching into my cave and dragging me out. But the person that I was when that happened had no way of framing that. She thought the things like that weren't even possible. And when I tried to explain to people what had happened to me, I knew that I sounded crazy before I even saw it in their eyes. I sounded crazy to myself. I had no way to justify or rationalize how something like that could even happen. And so I just shut it down. I blocked it out, and I tried not to think about it. But what Jim gave me in that conversation was a way to intellectually approach this impossible thing that had happened to me. And with that small but sturdy foothold, I was suddenly able to begin to reestablish some trust with myself that had been broken.

I feared at times beyond repair. What happened to me that were, morning was so fleeting and ephemeral that I could feel it slipping from my grasp even as it was happening. I often found myself doubting that it even happened, and ultimately it left behind no tangible evidence that I could use to ever prove that it happened to anyone else. But there is one piece of evidence that I can't deny, and that is me. Everything about me changed in that moment. I didn't just suddenly believe in God, but in beauty and truth and meaning, ideas that I'd long ago given up on, and that I'm not sure that I ever really took all that seriously to begin with even when I had believed in them. I remembered the person that I was when I was a child, before the world got to me, and I stepped back into her skin, and in doing so, back into my purpose and my power. I threw myself into creating something new that came from the deepest and purest and most

unselfconsciously earnest part of my soul, and I did it in service of something bigger than myself. And because I was able to do that, it has succeeded in ways that nothing else I've ever done has ever been able to. I didn't become a perfect person, not by a long shot. I am still very much a work in progress and I have more personal flaws than I can count. But I can't deny that I instantly became a better, happier, and more useful person than I'd ever been or even dreamed of being. And as much as I'd love to take some kind of credit for all that, I did it without ever intending to and without ever even engaging with the fact that it was happening. How does a person become better than they are in an instant without even trying?

It's hard for me to answer that question with anything but the answer that something reached in and pulled me up. And whatever it was wasn't me. And it wasn't human, at least not in any kind of a conventional sense of the word. I know that because whatever it was showed me for a fleeting moment, a reality that lies beyond the cave of my everyday understanding. It was not the human world that I saw. It was something else, something higher, something many orders of magnitude greater than the world I know in the same way that the sun outside a cave is many orders of magnitude greater than the fire that lights the inside. I don't know how to say what it was. Even now, I find it hard to talk about. And it's okay if you don't believe me. I don't expect or need you

to. But for anyone who has been to a place like that, even if only for a second, even if you've never admitted it to anyone, you know exactly what I mean. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365, copilot.com slash work. And I know that there are so many people out there who have had something

like that happen to them because I've found so many of them, literally hundreds, if not thousands, at this point. We're seemingly magnetically drawn to each other, and that may be the strangest part of all. I don't know how to explain exactly how this happens, except to say that it happens in ways that are equally effortless and improbable. My friendship with Jim is actually a perfect example of how this usually goes. We were strangers when, having finished the same book in the same week, we both ended up listening to Diana on theories of everything, and through our different but complementary fascination with the connection of Plato's cave to the phenomenon, we ended up meeting. And that friendship hasn't just been about two fellow travelers sharing a stretch of the road together and

comparing notes. Our conversations and collaboration have given rise to something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And if it was only Jim, I could maybe write it off as a happy accident. But it's not just Jim. When I had my experience in August of 2021, I came out of it feeling profoundly alone. Whatever it happened to me was so strange that I didn't think anyone would ever be able to understand. And I feared I was losing my mind. But today, most of the people that I interact with on a day-to-day basis haven't just gone through something similar, but these experiences have brought us together through bizarre and sometimes outright unbelievable synchronicity is that, in some cases, seem to come with the very clear message that we have work to do together.

And that's exactly what we're doing. I got to meet Diana Posulka for the first time in person, at the inaugural Soul Foundation conference at Stanford this past November. And in the talk she gave there, she explored four different research traditions in the field of uphology. She ended this talk by saying the following, quote, The fourth tradition is being forged here today, and I've been thinking about what to call it or how to describe it. We could just call it UAP Interdisciplinary Studies, but that misses the point, because there's

something more to it. I'll use myself as an example. I came to this work by accident. I've been studying UFOs and UAPs for a little over 10 years, but I'd been a scholar of religion for many more years than that. Most of my academic life, I was looking at records of references to cultural events. They included spinning discs and things like that. And then at this point, I met people from the invisible research tradition, the one that I just discussed. Tyler is a person in this program who defies simple categorization. He's a mission controller who works in the U.S. space program, and we work together. This was an accidental collaboration that produced interesting results. One of the results that

had produced was we went to the Vatican and we identified places where there had been historical anomalous miracle activity, and we correlated this with actual UFO hotspots. So I thought that this was an interesting collaboration because of the data that it produced. And this is just one example of the context of many of the unique and unlikely research collaborations that me and other researchers are doing. So how do you describe this fourth tradition that's starting now that this conference is helping to produce? Is it interdisciplinary? The word I picked up from my friends in AI is emergent. When I inquired about the definitions of emergence, I found that it certainly fits, that it's used to describe something that is arising, developing, or becoming apparent. It often

refers to the way complex systems or phenomena result from the interactions of simpler components. Tyler and I were simple components that gave rise to an interesting research discovery. I was originally going to say at this moment, we can be authors of the next myth of Prometheus, but I actually don't think that's how it works. The fourth research tradition appears to be an emergent phenomenon. And at this point, I'm just going to leave it at that. End quote. Now, I want to be clear that it's not my place to put words in Diana's mouth or to assume too much about what she means by that. But when she said those words, I felt that I understood on a deep level what she was talking about, and that whatever it happened to me and was continuing to happen to me, was somehow a part of this emergent phenomenon to which she referred.

So, after all of that, what do I think about what happened to me? The truth is that I still don't know, and I'm not sure that I ever will. As I reflect on my journey over the past two and a half years, it seems apparent to me that the real value of the experience has come from seeking the answer. I suspect that knowing the answer has never been the point. I do now consider myself to be an experience or in a way that I didn't before. My current interpretation of what happened to me is that I had contact with some kind of non-human intelligence. It's hard for me to conceptualize what that was in much more detail than that, but I sense that it was for a purpose,

and that the work that I'm doing with others who have had similar experiences is part of that purpose. But to be honest, I don't know if any of that is actually true. The thing about having your entire worldview obliterated at just a few moments while sitting in your bedroom one ordinary morning is that you suddenly realize that that sort of sudden tectonic shift in your understanding is possible, even if you're not looking for it. I'm acutely aware that I'm always potentially just one data point or one experience away from having to burn it all down and start over again. And so while I have opinions about what happened to me, I hold those opinions very loosely.

And that loose grip is even more necessary because although what happened to me in my bedroom only lasted a couple of minutes at most, in another sense it's still happening. I've told you one part of the story so far, which is the story of how we began to come to acknowledge and come to terms with my encounter. But the thing about anomalous experiences is that they tend to unfurl in your life in all directions, wrapping their tendrils through everything. Now receiving frequency transmission. The best thing about the human species is that we have emotion. There is nothing like the human emotion. that we feel in our physical bodies of pain and grief and sorrow and beauty and we taste

chocolate cake. We are able to go through all these human emotions and we keep going. And even though we feel the darkest of dark, the lightest of light, we somehow grow and choose to live another day. Even if we all fall into those really dark times, you know, we are so resilient as a human race and there's so much good within our hearts. So yeah.